


Zero Gravity

by chinuplilpup



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, i guess kind of a character study of pre-season aria, teenage aria idolizes jace rethal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-24
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-12-19 13:42:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11898951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chinuplilpup/pseuds/chinuplilpup
Summary: She's living fourteen-year-old Aria Joie’s best life, traveling on an OriCon ship carrying her very own OriCon mech, filling time jumping from floor to ceiling and from ceiling to floor, arms outstretched, playing at being Jace Rethal.Current Aria Joie is bored.





	Zero Gravity

**Author's Note:**

> vague spoilers for backstory/worldbuilding/the golden war, but takes place before the events of counter/weight
> 
> back to my roots, which means writing two lines of dialogue per 1000 words

Zero-G is always cool for like, the first ten minutes. Aria was so happy the first time she saw herself floating in the mirror with her pink-tipped hair fanned out behind her like a mermaid’s that the selfie she took then is still her profile picture on her private social media. 

Moving around the ship is more difficult in space but it’s kind of, almost, like flying. She spends a lot of the empty boring stretches of space jumping from floor to ceiling and from ceiling to floor, arms outstretched, playing at being Jace Rethal. 

If she was two years younger— Yeah, fourteen-year-old Aria would never have gotten bored bouncing off walls and starring in her own versions of the battles she and her parents used to watch on holovids every day. This whole thing is fourteen-year-old Aria Joie’s best life, traveling on an OriCon ship carrying her very own OriCon mech.

Current Aria Joie is bored. She’s basically in stasis until they get to her next concert on Counterweight. Nothing to do for the next 20 hours.

She floats, listless, in her bedroom and tries to write. EarthHome keeps hinting they’ll give her more creative control over her next album. She had some say before, though most of her inspiration then came from her diaries from age twelve to age fifteen, which now make Aria cringe. She’s trying to come up with new, better stuff now that she’s grown up.

She took to writing easily. She wouldn’t have applied to EarthHome if she didn’t want to write music. And it’s a way to fill her free time. Of which she has a lot.

Her head keeps bumping into the ceiling though. She hates strapping herself into a seat even more than she hates free-floating while she tries to concentrate on her computer screen. She gives up trying to get the right words for now. She pushes herself out of her room and starts to climb down the hallway towards the mech bay. 

Being strapped into the Brilliance’s cockpit has never felt claustrophobic. The Brilliance is freedom itself. She’s not allowed to take it out into the vacuum of space, or to do anything but watch the mechanic robots work, but she can go into the mech bay anytime she wants. 

Aria kicks off from the wall and zooms to the ceiling. As soon as her fingertips touch the cool metal, she pulls herself along a few arm-lengths and then pushes off towards the floor. She zig-zags her way through the halls like that. She becomes the Panther, twisting through the air on Counterweight and destroying enemy mech after enemy mech. 

As she approaches the mech bay she decides she’s been fighting her way towards Peace—currently portrayed by the dark, empty Brilliance. They’d been separated in battle. She feels off-balance because she hasn’t been fighting alongside her friend. 

Aria can see the shiny green of the Brilliance through the circular windows in the mech bay doors. She reaches a melodramatic arm towards it. Silently, her lips form the shape of a name: Addax. 

She leaps off the wall, and by the time she sees her tour manager turn the corner, it’s too late. 

Copper yelps when Aria collides with her and sends them both tumbling. Aria extricates herself first and then has to awkwardly watch as Copper rights herself a little more slowly.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” Aria says. 

Copper waves away Aria’s apologies. She is a peppy woman not too much older than Aria, probably. She’s nice enough. “Practicing your new routine?”

Aria shrugs and gives her the Aria Joie™ smile. “Yup.”

“That’s good,” she says. “We’re on schedule to arrive about three hours before your show. Are you resting your voice?”

Aria opens her mouth, and then closes it and gives Copper a thumbs up and a huge, cheesy grin. 

“Awesome.” She smiles, maybe even laughs a bit, but then she starts to move away. “I’m holding you to it, Joie.”

She’s already turned her back, so Aria rolls her eyes. When Copper glances back, Aria flashes her an “okay” hand signal. 

Copper disappears around the corner. Aria swims awkwardly towards the mech bay doors and presses her face to one of the windows. 

The Brilliance is perfect, but she’s not allowed to get in it right now. Aria sighs and continues down the hall towards the small kitchen-slash-living space and the bridge. 

She pulls herself hand by hand along the railings, and now she’s Jace himself, sneaking through a dangerous facility on a secret op. She doesn’t know if Jace did any secret or undercover missions, but whatever. 

She peeks into the kitchen and breathes a silent sigh of relief. Empty. 

The ship’s crew is just Aria, Copper, and the automated pilot robot that everyone calls 08. 

“Must be in the bridge,” Aria mutters, as Jace. She throws a look over her shoulder, her hair tossing cinematically around her face. The hallway is empty—she’s alone for this mission, and her stomach clenches with desperate hope that Tea and Addax’s parts of the plan are going well, that they’re both safe. 

Back to the mission at hand. She creeps towards the bridge, careful not to bang her boots against the metal walls. 08 is sitting in the pilot’s chair, as they usually are. Aria narrows her eyes. 

In her games 08 used to play the role of an Apostolisian or an Apostolisian ship that Jace and Peace and the rest of the Queen’s Gambit had been tasked to destroy. After a bit Aria started to feel not so great about that. 

She sometimes pretends that 08 is an Apostolisian ship carrying a huge bomb towards a major population center. In that case, of course, yeah, Jace would want to stop them. So would the Apostolisian rebels he fought with. But since the end of the war Aria’s been watching holovids from Coral and Minerva and Apostolos, and now even that makes her feel weird and a little sick about what she’s been doing with Jace Rethal’s memory. 

So she just floats towards them, just Aria Joie, as slow and quiet as she can. She gets within an arm’s length of the pilot’s chair, and then one of her arms flails a little too wildly and makes a soft whooshing sound. 

Aria freezes and holds her breath. She’s splayed out in the archetypal spy-being-lowered-down-into-a-vault pose. Okay. Zero-G can be kind of cool. 

“Hello, Aria,” 08 says without turning around. 

“Hi.” As long as she’s caught— Aria grabs onto the back of the pilot’s chair and fits her chin over 08’s shoulder. “How’s it going up here?”

“Nothing unusual has occurred,” 08 says. 

Aria settles into the co-pilot’s chair and braces her feet against the edge of the control panel so she doesn’t float away. 

“You might find it easier to take Copper by surprise,” 08 says, deadpan. 

“I already tackled her earlier, though,” says Aria. 

“That was brave of you.”

“I’m in hiding, 08.” Aria clutches at the arm of the co-pilot’s chair. “You won’t give me up when they come for me, right?”

08 doesn’t answer.

“Right?” Aria insists. 

“There is no one to give up,” they say. “I have been flying this ship for several hours with no incidents and no copilot. Anyone who looks here for a fugitive must be mistaken.”

Aria giggles, and they fall into silence. She slumps down in the seat and makes faces into her vidcomm for a while, but she doesn’t save any of the pictures. 

It’s not that she’s _nervous_ about Counterweight, though she’s hasn’t been there since the Golden War ended. Her skin prickles with anticipation in a way that’s not uncomfortable. It isn’t comfortable either. 

She pulls up her bookmarks and opens the 24/7 livestream of the active construction site for the Rethal-Addax Spaceport. She’s been watching it whenever she has time. It’s still just steel and concrete, but Aria can see the shape of what it’s going to become. Construction robots swarm over the site without showing signs of slowing, though it looks like it’s nighttime.

Aria’s life for the past few years has been a blur of stages, the inside of OriCon ships, and the polished perfect streets of JoyPark. She loves it— Well, she loves the stages. But watching this footage, watching interviews and news segments from planets picking themselves back up from the Golden War, makes her wonder if—

Aria doesn’t know what time it is planetside for her family. She’s stopped even trying to keep track while she’s on tour and can barely remember what time her body thinks it is. She doesn’t get to see her parents nearly as often as she would like, but Aria can’t complain. She sends them space Snapchats and a portion of her paychecks. 

Her mom has figured out space Snapchat and replies with videos of her dad in the kitchen, pictures of their new dog doing something ridiculous. 

It’s good. Aria’s happy. 

The grainy video starts to brighten. At first there’s only a shadow in the red-brown sky above the construction site but soon the morning reveals Weight, hanging heavy and close above the relentless robot and human workers. 

Aria minimizes the livestream and pulls up a file titled “bring future-neon back: socks: style inspo,” which is where she puts lyrics she doesn’t already have a beat to go with. 

The song she starts to write in that document, Aria has a feeling EarthHome wouldn’t like at all.


End file.
